I am an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker on organizational leadership, marketing, and social technology. Today I am co-founder and CEO of SocialxDesign, a new social technology consulting company at the intersection of marketing and human empowerment. For the 2012 election, SocialxDesign advised a number of groups -- including the DNC -- on multicultural outreach strategy.
In prior roles, I served as a senior member of the social-technology team at Deloitte Consulting, chief marketing officer for a publicly traded company, and managing partner of The Conversation Group (TCG), one of the first social-technology consulting firms. I'm a founding fellow at the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR) and a board member at Latinos for Social Media (LATISM).

Who Are the Top Online Political Influencers (And Does Clint Eastwood Really Matter?)

Upon launching a two-month research project, we ask: did Mr. Eastwood make or break Mr. Romney’s day?

by Giovanni Rodriguez and Toby Chaudhuri

[Note: Rodriguez and Chaudhuri are co-founders of SocialxDesign, a new strategy consulting firm based in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.]

Source: Wikipedia

We’re rolling into Charlotte this weekend for the DNC, and we’ve got two big questions on our minds: who are nation’s top online political influencers, and did Clint actually spoil Romney’s big moment last night?

Sounds facetious, but we were surprised to learn that Mr. Eastwood’s now infamous “empty chair” video was still trending on Twitter this morning while Mssrs. Romney and Rubio were not. And with so much of the sentiment on Clint trending negative, it’s reasonable to ask about the impact. It just so happens that we were getting ready to launch a project this weekend to monitor and track the coverage of online influencers on political issues. As a test run for our research platform – provided by our friends at Traackr, a San Francisco-based influencer monitoring firm – we’ll start with a rather simple query: the attention that Romney got last night relative to Rubio and Clint, who took the stage earlier that evening.

First, a bit more information about the people we are tracking. We’ve set up individual “monitor lists” of the top influencers in four categories that we expect will matter to voters this election: jobs and the economy, education, healthcare, and immigration reform (a nod to the Hispanic vote which many are thinking could swing the election, though studies show that Hispanic voter priorities are more aligned around the first three categories). While no list-making algorithm is perfect, we like the depth and complexity of Traackr’s metrics. Traackr’s PeopleSearch engine scours the content of the social web in order to identify the most influential people in any topic, niche or conversation. It identifies and ranks influencers based on the size of their audience, their level of engagement, and, most important, their relevance to the topic in question. For this project, Traackr helped us identify the keywords defining the most important, hot button topics affecting the election and pulled the top influencers within those conversations. The keywords will adjust over time, and so will the influencers.

Below this blog post, check out Traackr’s August 30 rankings for (a) the top ten general influencers on the US election, (b) the top ten influencers in the four topic areas, and (c) the top 50 influencers on the Hispanics vote (i.e., the 50 top online influentials who regularly post on issues pertaining to the Hispanic vote). Note: we will be rolling out other multicultural lists as we go, and by no means do we expect to get these lists entirely right. Some choices, in fact will be surprising, and many influentials (on any given day) will be left out. But the lists will provide an interesting sample of what top influentials – regardless of their own ethnicity — are saying on topics that matter to an increasingly diverse nation. Think of them as an open, influential online focus group on topics that matter to the US electorate. In future lists, we will attempt to go deeper on language, culture, and geography.

So where does this leave Clint? Did the RNC’s “surprise guest” crash the party and become an unwanted online influencer? Well, although he doesn’t rank on any of our lists, he certainly made himself heard last night in the communities we’re following. When monitoring how the top fifty general influencers reacted to last night’s speeches, as of 10 AM Pacific this morning Clint had scored 67 hits (tweets, Facebook mentions, blog posts) versus 53 for Rubio. When monitoring the top 50 Hispanic influentials, the numbers were better for Rubio, but not by much (47 for Rubio, 40 for Clint). And Mr. Romney? He did fine, thank you, scoring 348 hits with the general group, and 303 hits in the Hispanic group.

Insight here on the first day of this project? While Clint may not have exactly made Mr. Romney’s day, the Republican presidential nominee certainly had his moment. But for Mr. Rubio, who directly followed Clint on last night’s lineup, the outcome was not so good. As the U.S. Senator from Florida took the podium and made way into his speech – which in our opinion was the best in his entire political life – the chattering class was just getting started analyzing, dissecting, and socializing the spectacle that transpired just moments before.

We’ll be back on Monday, with a Labor Day preview of the conversations we expect next week. Another party, for sure, and another party crasher … maybe. We will try our best to be ready. Like comedy, in this election — the most socially-driven in history — timing will be everything.

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